Time is God’s experience of himself, and other thoughts about the worst months of the year
Plus: the world-building power of poetry, and emotional time-travel with Dana Gioia.
I was getting used to January. The timing of its sunrises. The as-it-should-be cold. The hope that the year would stay young, not get away from me. In the light of unhurried purple sunrises, I felt a slowness of time, a real chance to linger. To breathe in the sustained, cold monotony.
Especially this January. It was perhaps one of the coldest and snowiest in Colorado that I can remember. I think snow was on the ground the entire month. Even on the south-facing aspects. Here was a month full of brittle pink clouds above the red barn behind our house, capped with snow, looking east onto a snow-laden field running to meet the slowly growing light.
January, February, and March typically rank pretty high (low?) on most people’s “least-favorite months” lists. The lights of Christmas have been boxed up and stored in the attic. Easter and the in-breaking of spring feel far away. Unless you’re into, I dunno—Lent?—this unholy trio of months is the dregs of the calendar year. That sustained, cold monotony can feel like the actual worst.
I welcomed it. And I needed it. I needed a repetitive, gaze-at-the-red-barn-behind-our-house start to the new year. I needed slowness, sameness. (My hero is a Welsh farmer who has had the same dinner every day for 10 years.) Last year, something big seemed to greet each turn of the calendar. Lindsey landed a once-a-week nursing shift—an amazing blessing we weren’t looking for, that also required us to stay flexible with family rhythms. We bought, remodeled and moved into a new house—an amazing blessing but also disruptive to family rhythms and senses of normalcy. Lindsey and I experienced new stresses in our long war against infertility. I lost two grandparents—my mom’s mom and my dad’s dad. Our son’s biological father died.
As the year rolled over, I was praying that maybe “this year would be better than the last,” as Adam Duritz would say.
“Better” is too undefined. I felt a need for reprieve. I felt the need for a spiritual and cultural reset. I felt the need to build in more life white space in order to “hold on to these moments as they pass.”
But it’s impossible to hold on to moments as they pass. Time slips through the most tightly clinched fists.
As I write this, it is the seventh anniversary of our oldest child’s “Happy Home Day.” James was placed with us the first week of February 2016. He was 2-and-a-half when he first walked into our lives and living room. Walking. Kind of talking. Sweet but scared. (But so were Lindsey and I.) Here was a full-sized toddler with a personality and a past.
God is writing a story, not erasing one. And he is writing it through time.
It was sometime later that Lindsey and I began to grieve having missed the first two years of his life. We also grieved the all-too-quickness of his toddler phase and the stressed, fleeting nature of those months. The termination of his biological parents’ parental rights (known as termination of parental rights—TPR) lasted almost exactly a year from the date James was placed with us. When I look at photos from this season, I sometimes struggle to place the memories or rightly remember what his little voice sounded like. So much of what should have been precious and endearing and joyful got swallowed up by the locusts of the foster system and the relentlessness of time. Our son is 9-and-a-half now. I have only known him for seven of those years. But he’s the boy who made us parents.
Good reads: “Animals grunt. Men make poems. And poems make worlds.”
One of my favorite writers on Substack is a dude by the name of Brandon Meeks. He publishes under Poiema. He’s a great, God-fearing storyteller.
He had a piece published at Ad Fontes a couple weeks ago titled “Poetry and the Metaphysics of Wonder.” It’s fantastic. It has the line about men making poems and poems making worlds. He writes:
The best poetry follows from a robust view of creatio ex nihilo. This is true not only because its focus is on a world divinely created and constituted “good,” but also because it recognizes the givenness and potency of words. Poetry is the glorification of human language. As such, it transfigures everything of which it speaks. And, of course, it speaks of everything.
Poets’ corner: Dana Gioia’s “The Summer Storm”
Forgive me for sharing a poem about summer in the thick of winter. That’s not normally my style. But a few lines from Dana Gioia’s excellent poem “The Summer Storm” came to mind as I was finishing up my thoughts on time, Happy Home Days, and the stories that God writes with our lives. (I have written about another of Gioia’s poems, “Places to Return,” here.)
In “The Summer Storm,” Gioia questions the emotional integrity of our memories. He doubts that we could make our lives better if we could go back in time and re-write parts of our stories.
And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.
That’s quite the quatrain. Do your soul some good by first thanking God for the story he has and is writing for you, then get lost in “The Summer Storm.”
Thanks, y’all. Til next time.